The return of the prodigal son

Its been a long loney lonely lonely lone ly time. Yes it has.

Baffled that the White House no longer makes the case that Mr. Hussein had WMDs

The television commercials are attention-grabbing

write Yochi J. Dreazen and John D. McKinnon in their WSJ aticle about Move America Forward:

Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had "extensive ties" to al Qaeda. The discoveries are being covered up by those "willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions."

The hard-hitting spots are part of a recent public-relations barrage aimed at reversing a decline in public support for President Bush's handling of Iraq. But these advertisements aren't paid for by the Republican National Committee or other established White House allies. Instead, they are sponsored by Move America Forward, a media-savvy outside advocacy group that has become one of the loudest -- and most controversial -- voices in the Iraq debate.

…Melanie Morgan, a conservative San Francisco radio host … says she is baffled that the White House no longer makes the case that Mr. Hussein had WMDs. The White House dropped the claims after a variety of investigators found no evidence to substantiate them. But Ms. Morgan says her ads are justified, based on documents given to her in Iraq by an Iraqi general she identified as Abdul Qader Jassim, and on information from U.S. officials involved in the hunt for weapons there. She believes Mr. Hussein possessed WMDs, and that those weapons remain in Iraq today.

Yeah, running back to the hotel bar

Those good-for-nothing cowardly EUrine Peein monitors run for cover when their Pali Death Cult buddies fire a few shots.

Will they be able to use it to locate their heads stuck firmly up their asses?

Du toc, du toc, et toujours du toc. The Zeropeans try to get it on the global positioning market. Of course, and as always, this whole thing will turn out to be a good deal more expensive than advertised, and hapless European taxpayers will foot the bill. Oh, and don't expect it to be delivered on time either.

N'en déplaise aux vieux pédés aigris du 8ème

Ils en ont ces danois ! Pas du tout comme les commentateurs franchouilles. Lâches, veules, et toujours un peu pédé sur les bords, qui s'attaquent volontiers aux cibles faciles comme les cathos et les juifs (c'est à dire, les cibles qui ne risquent point de leur exploser à la gueule). Si tu entends quelque part des propos faciles, sans risque, et surtout consensuels, ils ont été proférés par un franchouille qui se targue d'être provoc.

On peut voir quelques-unes des images incriminées ici.

Getting to the Root Causes: The Injustice of the World…

(Shookhran to RV)

So desperate to promote themselves as better than Americans that they kowtow to thugs

It apparently takes a European-born American to see what the Euro-elites are -- so desperate to promote themselves as better than Americans that they kowtow to thugs

writes Debra Saunders.

…the European press had canonized Williams -- regurgitating the Tookie propaganda about his "redemption." Agence France Presse called Williams a "repentant gang leader." London's The Independent gushed about "the widely expressed sense that if Mr. Williams were not regarded as an embodiment of rehabilitation and redemption, then the terms had no meaning in the U.S. criminal justice system." You'd never know that Williams never apologized for killing four innocent people.

American newspapers dutifully reported on Europeans' revulsion at the death penalty -- they see it as "a medieval atrocity," as The New York Times put it. You'd never guess that somehow Graz kept Schwarzenegger's name on its stadium after he failed to stop the January execution of triple-murderer Donald Beardslee. Or that many Europeans aren't thrilled that the European Union forced abolition of capital punishment on member countries. …

The Graz incident shows a side of Europe that leaves many of us American rubes cold. Left-wing Austrians -- and Americans -- were quick to condemn the California death penalty and Schwarzenegger as barbaric, even as they embraced a man who killed four innocent people. To condemn an execution while canonizing a killer -- that's just too civilized.

Leftist statesmanship in a nutshell

Rosenburgs outed and outsmarted by a five-year-old.

Is it, like, still 1971? When comedians begged to be taken seriously?

Frighteningly the god given man of ze hardhat is running for president as a stunt.

By way of France-Echos: Dieudonné hates that vaunted republicain communitarianism because French society can’t give preferential treatment to political factions based on usefulness as a guilt-tripping tool:

FR.:«"C'est une candidature anticommunautariste qui veut croire dans les valeurs de la République et qui va interroger la République dans ses incohérences" a déclaré à l'AFP l'humoriste peu avant une représentation à Lille de son spectacle intitulé "1905" et dédié à la laïcité.

Candidat depuis le 22 décembre, il a dénoncé les "conditions particulièrement difficiles d'intégration d'une certaine catégorie de Français" et le "poids de certains esprits communautaristes" en France et a indiqué qu'il était prêt à "passer par une discrimination positive pour pouvoir décommunautariser" bien que ce soit "un constat d'échec de l'intelligence".»

EN: «"This is a anticommunitarian candidature which wants to believe in the values of the Republic and which will question the Republic’s inconsistencies" the humorist told AFP just before a presentation in Lille of his play entitled "1905" which is dedicated to secularity.

A candidate since December 22, he denounced the "particularly difficult task of integrating certain categories of the French" and the "burden of the communitarian view" in France and indicated that he was ready "to advance affirmative action as a de-communitarian instrument" even if it is "an acknowledgement of failure of reason".»

In other words, he’d rather have a kind of supremacy based on victimhood, and in spite the inconsistency of demanding an unequal form of social secularism. This terribly tribal view of the world thinks there’s actually some remedial value in the emotional desire instead to not just stick it to the man, but now to stick it to an even statistically smaller group – ‘casper’.

Animal nation

Beasts.

Geo-fools

Occasionally, I check our site meter. I happened to notice a novelty. It was a reader from Vietnam no less.



People doing word searches occasionally come our way using seemingly random strings of text. What was this chap looking for on the net when he tripped over us?



It seems to me that the sickening obsession which has diseased the left has become one of its’ great exports. They have “globalized” themselves in the worst sense – after all, I can’t imagine that there were ever many Jews to fixate on and hate in Vietnam.

Either that or a western moonbat peddling his wares or part of that loving, warm, helpful network of NGOs.

Feel free to comment. Have at it, peeps.

Milk poverty hysterically.

"Make Poverty History" campaign pledges not being delivered

«Charities have accused celebrities of "hijacking" the Make Poverty History campaign and said pledges to cut the gap between rich and poor nations has had little impact.

"There are celebrities who really didn't seem to know what they were talking about and (musician and campaigner) Bob Geldof's comments after G8 were very unhelpful because they made people think everything had been achieved."

Geldof described the summit as "mission accomplished, frankly" giving "10 out of 10" for pledges on increasing aid by 50 billion dollars each year and "eight of 10" on writing off unpayable debts.

But Timms said that while "some progress" had been made on debt relief "we have yet to see any of those pledges translated into a penny for the poorer countries and there was no progress on trade".»

It gets worse. Tories have been dragged onto the Kultursmog-mobile, and Saint Sir Geldof the Magnificent is to advise Tories on global poverty relief. And because we’re talking about conservatives, he was asked questions that they would never pose otherwise, forcing him to answer with stuff like:

«Anti-poverty campaigner Bob Geldof insisted that he was "in no-one's pocket" after agreeing to advise a Conservative party policy group tasked with creating a strategy to defeat global poverty.»

State Party Line

Après avoir accepté de publier hier, et du bout des doigts, un article écrit par Pierre-André Taguieff au sujet du maniement de l'étiquette de néo-réac par les gôchos-bobos-nonos-alters-pédés, Libé se rattrape aujourd'hui avec une descente en règle de Alain Finkielkraut. Histoire de remettre les pendules à l'heure et de rappeler à l'intelligentsia parisienne les diktats et autre oukase qui sont en vigueur.

Woof

"Jacky, do you swear that you’ll continue to fight for our special social advantages?"

"Social rights! social rights!"

Nostalgia for the Time Before America Brought Insecurity, Chaos, and Massacres to Iraq

…workers in the Shi'ite holy city of Karbala uncovered remains that are thought to be part of a mass grave dating to a 1991 uprising against dictator Saddam Hussein

writes Qassim Abdul-Zahra as the Washington Times reporter discusses a time before America brought "insecurity", "chaos", and "massacres" to Iraq.

The remains -- discovered Monday -- were sent for testing yesterday in an effort to identify the bodies, said Rahman Mashawy, a Karbala police spokesman. He did not say how many bodies were found, but some reports put the number at 31.

Les bien-pensants jouent à se faire peur

L'épouvantail Le Pen ne fonctionnant plus du tout, il fallait trouver autre chose. Les gôchos-bobos-nonos-alters-pédés ont donc inventé le néo-réac.

Let's just rename it ‘Thank a Leftist’ week

Thanks to endless revisionism, self-doubt, self-hatred, and unbalanced criticism of Judeo-Christian morality, people are turning elsewhere to find answers to life’s questions. You know, the questions that mush-headed elitist have tried to tell you are unknowable, at times telling us that any mainstream view of the world is evil, and even employing the law to do it in support of their own malignant narcissism:

«Ms. Fallot, who converted to Islam three years ago after asking herself spiritual questions to which she found no answers in her childhood Catholicism, says she finds the suspicion her new religion attracts "wounding." "For me," she adds, "Islam is a message of love, of tolerance and peace."
It is a message that appeals to more and more Europeans as curiosity about Islam has grown since 9/11»

Elsewhere western dhimmi support of the ‘conquista’ continues.

«This year, perhaps taking their cue from the New York Times, the story was recycled in a thousand other news venues. Political leaders around the world took up the lie as their own. And, of course, Arab and Muslim leaders were only too happy to begin championing the cause of these poor, misplaced, mistreated Christians.

There's just one problem. It's a total, bald-faced lie – another one of those revisionist history lessons being written even while the history is still taking place.

Because, for the life of this New York Times reporter and his editors back home, they can't think of a single legitimate way to blame Israel for the Christian exodus.

Here is the truth. Bethlehem, once a 90 percent Christian town, now only claims only about 20,000 of the 60,000 Arab residents – about 35 percent.

...Muslim terrorists have intentionally placed Christians in the crossfire between them and Israel. They did that when they seized the Church of the Nativity, nearly destroying it, defecating in the hallways, smashing statues and stealing precious objects.»

A puzzling thing for the religion of love, of tolerance and peace…

What’s more the handful of people who are over the edge have turned into something more than a ‘cabal’:

«French Holocaust Denier Roger Garaudy on Iranian TV: “Gas Chambers Were Not Used to Kill Jews”

Roger Garoudy: None of the well-known people who defeated Hitler and exposed his barbaric deeds said even a single word about gas chambers.
In Churchill's Memoirs of the Second World War, in Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, and in General de Gaulle's memoirs there is no mention of this killing device.»

Thank a leftist. It is after all “holiday week” – if only they understood the definition of an epiphany.

Les Désespérés

Suite au mythe du Bac + 5 qui habite en banlieue, nous avons le nouveau mythe fabriqué de toute pièce et propagé par Le Monde Al-Jazira sur Seine, à savoir la racaille qui a l'intention de voter (dès que les bulletins de vote seront déguisés en Corans). Le Parti Socialiste recherche électeurs désespérément tout comme Le Monde Al-Jazira sur Seine recherche lecteurs désespérément.

Guess. It’s between Argentina and Lebanon.

Unconcerned by and unaware of the future, a fossilized, oil dependant economy tumbles into poverty-creating mediocrity as it’s surpassed by broad based competitors. No, friends – it isn’t Argentina.

Linky-love to Biased BBC

Bad blood

Les sidaïques d'Act-Up baissent les bras au moment où Aounit chope le sida mental.

They're smelly too

Self-righteous blowhard lesson-giving lying pricks.

Time is on their side

Sleeping rage in the Paris suburbs.

Democracy, European-Style: Who Cares What the Public Thinks, If Their Élites Know Better?

A poll by the local newspaper found that over 70 percent of the public opposed removing Mr. Schwarzenegger's name from the stadium.

That is one of the things we learn in Richard Bernstein's article on the Graz authorities' decision to change the name of the city's Stadion Graz-Liebenau. Another thing we learn is that one of the ideas in circulation

was to name the stadium after the Crips, the gang that Mr. Williams founded.

The idea never seems to have gotten off the ground, but on a continent where a convicted murderer is name honorary citizen of Paris, why doesn't the idea itself surprize me? Why doesn't it surprize me at all?

"Permanent daily lynching has become the national sport; our society demonizes"

…Burn, baby, burn was a cry of grief or vengeance from America's years of black rage, but it was also the incontrovertible truth of the riots that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin recently insisted to CNN were really a blander, less shameful variety of social disturbance

writes John Vinocur.

Death and serious injury were avoided here for the most part. Still, toting up the score, the Interior Ministry indicates something far different than this cleansed version:
 
Ten thousand cars destroyed and more than 200 public buildings set afire. Damages estimated by insurers at between E80 million and E150 million. More than 3,200 arrests. More than 400 rioters sentenced to prison.
 
And now, after a period of quiet, here's an unsettling realization for 2006. It's that entirely apart from the official New Year's precautions, the weeks since the riots have not brought the sense of a nation coming together on some kind of common ground.
 
Rather the opposite. It is a time of new accusations and new verbal excess. It is one of rioters playing victim, or being manipulated by ideologues into the status of history's aggrieved, without responsibilities or obligations to France.
 
Most obviously, it is a time when the real, linked villains behind the riots - unemployment, and a reflexive insistence by most of the political caste that a quota system for advancement won't help - get pushed out of the discussion in favor of easier polemics. Bringing affirmative action to society here or profoundly changing the stagnant French economic system have the look of ideas that threaten the entrenched left/right status quo too much to make serious headway as the essence of the debate.
 
Instead of what has to be remade for France to function in confidence again, the headline issues, discussed with special viciousness, have run to the historical effects of French colonialism in North Africa, black Africa and the Caribbean and whether France owes its heirs systematic repentance.
 
Or to the position of a few writers, now accused as "neoreactionaries," who have dared ask about the role in the country's unrest of resistance to integration among some Muslim immigrants. Or further, to a characterization, vocal on the left and among a group of showbiz and sports celebrities with distant roots in housing project misery - and murmured insistently on the anti-modernist right - that makes Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and 2007 presidential candidate, the one-size-fits-all guilty party for the troubles.
 
"Permanent daily lynching has become the national sport," Franz Oliver Giesbert, editor of the center-right newsweekly Le Point, wrote in its current issue. "Our society demonizes."
 
Almost everyone, Giesbert suggested, prefers picking on more familiar enemies than "our weakness and cowardice" that have led to an overwhelming national debt and the 35-hour workweek's becoming "our official ideology."
 
As counterintuitive as it may seem to many Americans at least, the French left won't touch affirmative action because it is considered anti-egalitarian and potentially threatens, in an obviously less articulated way, the white power structure in the left's leadership.
 
For the traditional French right, running from President Jacques Chirac to just short of Jean-Marie Le Pen's bigotry, the affirmative action notion challenges the myths of the Republic and their legitimacy: That everyone signing on to Frenchness is an equal recipient of the country's glory, that a unique, admirable social and not-quite-capitalist economic model exists in France, and that this structure must not be dismantled in favor of ideas coming from a dark world beyond the seas.
 
Between the two poles, Sarkozy - a man with populist instincts which can jostle his convictions - is at the center of the manufactured scorn keeping the riots' sense of unresolved grievance alive. (And the prefects saying the police must judge, case by case, if someone claiming to be out of gas truly wants to start a stuck car or fuel a riot.)
 
The chief cop and presidential candidate must live during the coming months with the fact of having used the supposedly incendiary, and certainly not politically correct word, racaille, or rabble, to designate the troublemakers who instigated the riots.
 
But the orthodox left and the right have to deal with the fact that Sarkozy emerged from them with polls showing he took the right approach in putting down the unrest and as the favorite to succeed Chirac a year and a half from now.
 
All this while he continues to advocate affirmative action, the vote for noncitizens in some local elections, government subsidies to bring Islamic preachers out of the projects' cellars, and a complete break with the economic and social services systems that have brought France massive unemployment and indebtedness.

What do you mean by " I didn't order the triple-delight?"

Stanley Kurtz, Paul Belein, and the world of the future. Youd better like it. You wont have a choice, even though we were all warned that, say, perhaps, constructing catagories that permit one to marry a herd of sheep might not make good law or a good society.

The Tsunamis of Aid Dollars from America

Get ready to see Europeans make fun of, and shake their heads concerning, news about Americans' beliefs.

On the other hand, expect them to ignore, or to minimise, news about Americans' extraordinary generosity. Indeed, that is hardly anything that boosts the Euros' litany of self-serving self-congratulation.

Americans are "stingy." This was the accusation hurled at the U.S. almost exactly one year ago today by Jan Egeland, United Nations Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, immediately after the Asian tsunami disaster.

Even by U.N. standards, it was a particularly absurd anti-American slur--although it no doubt expresses the view of many foreign elites, who have come to believe that government is the only true source of goodness and charity. In the weeks and months that followed the tsunami, American citizens dug deep into their wallets, donating some $1.78 billion to the relief effort in Asia--dwarfing the contributions of other developed nations. Since October Americans have also contributed $78 million to assist the casualties of the Pakistan earthquake.

And lest there be any doubt that the Good Samaritan ethic is alive and well in America, consider the latest totals of charitable giving to help the New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina. The Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University announced last week that the total value of private donations in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita has reached $3.12 billion, thus "setting what is believed to be a record for a single disaster and recovery effort." This tsunami of aid dollars was donated in just three and a half months.

More astounding still is that this Gulf Coast aid is only a little more than 1/100th of what Americans donate to charities and churches every year. The quarter trillion dollars a year that Americans provide to sustain the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, the American Cancer Society, their local churches, universities and such is greater than the entire GDP of most countries. Bill and Melinda Gates have given more dollars to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa than have many nations. And all of this comes on top of the $1 trillion in taxes that Americans pay each year to support government income-transfer and benefit programs.

This generosity in money and volunteerism has been a hallmark of American society since its earliest days. Some 150 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville lauded the impulse of Americans (in contrast to Europeans) to set up churches, schools, orphanages, hospitals, homeless shelters and other civic aid organizations throughout the land.

What impels Americans to engage in such kindness to strangers? We suspect that Americans give to private charities because they recognize that these initiatives work best. Bobby Jindal, a Congressman from New Orleans whose own home was badly damaged by flood waters, tells us that "by far the most effective relief efforts have come from private charitable aid organizations. FEMA and other state/local government agencies set up bureaucracies and red tape, while private businesses and charities moved in swiftly to alleviate the human suffering on the ground."

Mr. Jindal tells the story of an elderly woman who dropped off a white envelope at a county sheriff's office in Louisiana filled with eight single dollar bills and a note of apology saying that this was all she could afford to give. Another woman wrote a quarter-million-dollar relief check with only one stipulation: that her generous act remain anonymous.

There is a mythology in the philanthropic world that Americans are motivated to give by the somewhat selfish pursuit of a tax deduction. But a surprisingly large percentage of charitable gifts aren't even itemized on tax forms. Moreover, the Tax Foundation has provided compelling evidence that over the past 50 years--as tax rates on the highest earners have fluctuated from a high of 90% to a low of 28%--American giving has hardly deviated from 2% of personal income. In the 1980s, as tax-rate reductions reduced the value of the charitable tax deduction by about half, the level of charitable giving nearly doubled. This suggests that charitable giving would continue to flourish under a flat-rate tax system with no deduction.

Which brings us back to the charge that Americans are Scrooges in providing international aid. The World Bank recently lectured the U.S. government to double its level of foreign aid. Never mind that the U.S. is now spending tens of billions of dollars in what is nothing if not a massive humanitarian mission to restore civil society and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. And never mind the humanitarian aid provided by the U.S. military in Pakistan and after the tsunami.

But yes, it's true, that when it comes to funding self-serving bureaucracies that don't produce results--such as much of the U.N. and most other multi-government foreign-aid schemes--Americans are skeptics. For good reason. Study after study has documented that there is no correlation between the amount of foreign assistance a nation receives and its subsequent rate of economic development. Think Africa, which has received hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to little positive effect. This suggests that the optimal amount of U.S. government development aid may be zero.

But at the same time, when it comes to private Good Samaritan undertakings that do alleviate poverty and despair, Americans are second to none, giving three to four times the amount of "official" foreign aid, according to Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute's Global Liberty Project. That's not stingy. It's smart.

Warning: experimental blogging

Not unlike interpretive dance or somesuch, its actually more like a retreat. We here at the ¡No Pasaràn! central committee call it silent blogging.

Merry Christmas. Be thankful for those you love, and the freedoms you have.